HiSilicon Announces New Kirin 950 SoC

HiSilicon held an extensive media briefing on their brand new flagship SoC – the Kirin 950. The new chipset is a very large leap for the Huawei subsidiary as it represents the first true flagship successor to the Kirin 920 that we’ve seen a little over a year ago in the Honor 6 review. In the past analysis of the Kirin chipset’s overall performance in phones such as the Mate 7 or the newP8 was not overly positive. The reason to this was mostly due to lacklustre showing of the GPU and general low efficiency of the SoC. For the very vast majority of use-cases and users the GPU isn’t a bottleneck and the full potential of more powerful GPUs are never utilized, so the vendors prefer to save die space and thus cost by using less GPU cores. As such, while the upgrade represents a significant improvement over previous Kirin chipsets, one shouldn’t expect it to compete with more powerful alternatives such as from Qualcomm or Samsung. Due to the new SoC having both A72 CPU cores and the new T880 Mali GPU I was expecting it to also ship with ARM’s new CCI-500 – after all, 3 IPs were launched simultaneously back in February. Unfortunately HiSilicon explained that the new interconnect wasn’t ready during the Kirin 950’s design phase and thus the designers had to rely on the older CCI-400 that has been used in all big.LITTLE SoCs released to date.